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DVD writer firmware upgrade possible?

Asked by Iain Houston

K3b is reporting an error while writing the final housekeeping track data after all the data files have been burned OK to ASUS DRW-1608P2s (pioneer OEM rebadged apparently).
First thing I wanted to ensure is DVD writer has latest firmware.
Downloaded latest from Asus site. Of course it's a DOS exe plus two big data files.
All too big to go on a single floppy as one data file is 1.9Mbytes.
I can't think how to proceed. I don't have Windows or DOS on my Ubuntu box.
Is there an Ubuntu / linux way of updating the DVD writer's firmware?
I googled something about a linux / Ubuntu? firmware-extractor but think this has been written especially for a speedtouch modem.
I have Wine but presumably it's not safe to run a firmware-updating program in Wine.
I don't know how to make a DOS-bootable CD ROM either!
I feel stumped right now!
Can anybody help? Many thanks!

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Thomas Aaron (tom-system76) said : 		#1

Yes, it's possible.

I'm trying to figure out exactly how to do it too, though.
Have a look at this:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=318789

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Daniel Stiner (danstiner) said : 		#2

This is perhaps a bit late, but I'm quite ecstatic over my new find.
DVD firmware can be updated from within Ubuntu as simply as Windows.

The trick is simple: sudo wine sfdnwin.exe

Wine must have raw access to the dvd writer, and that requires root access. No guarantees, but it seems to work fine on my Samsung SH-S182D.

One final note: Wine will complain when run as root, saying you do not own your wine directory. I got around this by my chowning my ~/.wine directory to root temporarily.

sudo chown -R root ~/.wine
sudo wine sfdnwin.exe
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER ~/.wine

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Krishna E. Bera (keb) said : 		#3

thanks Daniel! it worked for me too with an LG firmware upgrade.

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Daniel Stiner (danstiner) said : 		#4

Awesome! Glad to be able to help a fellow Ubuntu user. I hope Iain was also able to get things fixed eventually.

This seems like it would come up fairly often... It would be awesome to have a package that checks every month or so for firmware updates for any hardware installed on a ubuntu system and easily upgrades it if the user allows.
Maybe this will be something to add to my want-todo list for this summer :)

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Jarkko Lietolahti (jarkko-jab) said : 		#5

I also succesfully upgraded MATSHITABD-MLT from 1.00 to 1.01. It's installed in Sony Vaio VGN-FW31ZJ. Run wine as root.

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Mtt.Castelli (mtt.castelli) said : 		#6

I also succesfully upgraded GSA-S10N from A100-01 to A103 on my Dell XPS m1330. There's just one step of more, here you need a .dll:

1) sudo chown -R root ~/.wine

2) download mfc42.dll (you can find it googling!) to the same folder of GSAS10NA103-00.exe

3) sudo wine '/home/USER/.../GSAS10NA103-00.exe'
4)reboot and chown back .wine dir

Thanks everybody here, and to the Wine developers.

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Daniel Stiner (danstiner) said : 		#7

I just wanted to add a disclaimer for my method of running the windows firmware installer under a root wine.

It certainly isn't a very safe method, it could very possibly corrupt your drive permanently, the first post has more reliable (albeit more complex) method. So far however, people seem to be having success. WINE is just that awesome. (If you know more details of why/how wine does this low level IDE access, and how safe it is, please comment)

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